


kin

by angularmomentum



Series: roots [2]
Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Magic, minor consent issues, mythical creatures, sentient forests, sequelitis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-16
Updated: 2018-04-16
Packaged: 2019-04-23 18:44:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14338731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angularmomentum/pseuds/angularmomentum
Summary: Nicke always goes home for Midsummer.





	kin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [babygotbackstrom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/babygotbackstrom/gifts), [screamlet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/screamlet/gifts).



> Sliding in a day late! Thank you guys for running the flash fic challenge again this year! In keeping with the mythical creatures theme, have a sequel. 
> 
> If you have not read the previous work in this series this will make approximately zero sense.

Nicke isn’t sure what to do over the summer.

Maybe for other students it’s a straightforward dilemma: stay at school and opt into the shortened extra term that takes place over the month of eternal light, taught by the herbology professor, Fedorov, who never seems to leave the school anyway. Or: miss out on potential early graduation to go home and get away from the punishing climate of Kholdovstoretz even on its warmest days. That seems to be the dilemma plaguing Sasha anyway. Nicke doesn’t know how to tell him that he has no advice to give him, curled up in Sasha’s red-curtained prefect’s bed with his head on Sasha’s huge chest, letting him coax his big, gentle fingers through Nicke’s wind-tangled hair.

Sasha’s not as warm as Nicke is, but he’s only human. He’s a furnace by their standards, Nicke thinks, a pillar of flame disguised as a boy, a great big font of life. Maybe that’s just how Nicke sees him, his untrustworthy eyes always showing half of something, glimpses of the world-out-of-sight that makes it so hard to just accept that so few people seem to know it’s there. Maybe it’s because Nicke isn’t human. That always seems to be the final explanation, the full-stop at the end of every sentence about him. Oh, he’s just a skogsrå, he’s bound to be strange.

Nicke puts his ear to the middle of Sasha’s chest, listening to the heart beneath, closing his eyes to see the outline of him, the rushing, pulsing veins and the core of his magic, red and expansive and comforting.

“Nicky?” Sasha asks him, hand going still. “What’s wrong?”

Damn him. They’ve known each other a bare year, and he can still always tell. “Nothing,” he lies, anyway. “I don’t think you should stay for summer. Don’t you want to go back to the city?” Nicke has never been to a city. He has only a vague idea of what they’re like but Sasha speaks of his Moscow often, and always with love. Nicke likes it when he talks about it.

“Would you come?” Sasha asks him, resuming his petting after a moment of telling hesitation.

Nicke opens his eyes, blinking away the glorious, invisible map of his body, looking up to glimpse his face, equally wonderful. “No,” Nicke says. “I have to go home.” Of course, for him it’s never a choice. His dilemma is how he manages to keep himself in one piece, the two awkwardly melded halves of him in balance.

Sasha shrugs, movement a tidal wave. “So maybe I come with you,” he says, leaving Nicke space to object and time to do it.

What if he did? What if this was one thing he could keep, this surprising intimacy, this bareness with Sasha that no longer makes him feel stripped down to bark. “We’re married,” Nicke says, testing the fit of it again, just to see if it still sits in the space it has begun to occupy, the thin isthmus between a joke and a fact. “Maybe you should know what you’re getting into.”

“I already know,” Sasha says, drawing him closer so he can kiss him, lips pressing just at the very corner of Nicke’s lips. “Sometimes it’s good to do everything backwards.”

“I should be home for midsummer,” Nicke tells him, a whisper half into his mouth before he finds a better angle and sets himself to kissing him in earnest.

-

“Hello, darling,” Sasha’s favourite portrait says, when Nicke wakes up groggy and alone in Sasha’s bed. “He didn’t want to wake you, he’s gone to breakfast.”

“Thanks,” Nicke mutters, trying to rouse himself. It’s always worse this time of year, his body on high alert, awake awake awake until finally it demands sleep, crushing him under its weight until the part of him desperate to flower starts to ache for sun again. He’s gone days without before, until the human blood in him began to ache and he began to see things strangely, bent and distorted. He heaves himself the the edge of bed, landing on his feet.

He’s just about ready to stand when Olga Bunina clears her throat. “May I have a word with you in confidence?”

Nicke is unsure how confident he is in her confidence, but Sasha trusts her, and she is unusually sentient for a portrait. If Nicke had more of a feel for art he might wonder if she were a kind of horcrux, a true shred of her original soul rather than its likeness, but he has no skill for that kind of magic. “About what?” He asks her, suddenly aware that he’s staring.

“Will you be taking him to Midsummer?” She asks with the proper inflection, lilt tilting into her speech even in Russian.

“If he wants to come.”

“Children,” she says to the painted ceiling of her parlour, exasperated. “Of course he _wants_ to. He’s a marvel, that one. Hasn’t _met_ a thing he couldn’t throw himself at and enjoy. I’m asking _you,_ dear one. _He’s_ not the one so concerned with seeming human, is he?”

“I should go to breakfast,” Nicke murmurs.

“Is this the time to mention what happened last time you didn’t tell him something?” Olga asks him, far more gently than he’s ready for. “I’ve always loved a good love story, you know, but he’s really very taken with you. It does make some of us rather blinder than we might be otherwise.”

“What?”

“Dearest,” she says, eating one of her endless painted chocolates, “you’re not at Durmstrang anymore.”

A sharp pain lances through him, a sense-memory of rage and agony, the kind of thing he’d thought he’d left behind, suffused with the strange, fragile happiness he’s found up here, thin and tentative as the first freeze on a pond. “We’re not really married,” he says. “He doesn’t owe me anything.”

She licks the tips of her small, plump fingers one by one, even though no chocolate has painted itself onto her oil-pigment skin. “None of us should, in love,” she counsels. “But he’ll give you his heart to hold anyway.”

“You read too many novels,” he tells her, forcing himself to his feet and shaking off the last of his grogginess. Sasha will be on the field by now, he thinks. Nicke wants nothing more than to go find him, to let the Arctic rake its thin, frigid fingers across his cheeks and let Sasha chase him.

-

The thing Nicke never expected about Kholdovstoretz is how much he loves it. Compared to Durmstrang it’s tiny, only a hundred or so students at its very most, compared to the thousand thronging Durmstrang’s grounds, all the pure blooded children of people who want their lineage to perpetuate and those who want to dive into that world.

His father is an alumnus. His mother never went to school. Neither did his brother. Nicke supposes maybe he should be honoured they took him at all.

He misses Andre and Marcus, who never seemed to care at all that he was only half human, but that’s it. He doesn’t like to think of it often because the anger it raises is a heat, a forest fire, an echo of the spell he left rooted beneath the castle. He heard from Andre that it took them months to untangle it, to unweave it from the roots buried into the ancient foundations, winding into the walls. “Everyone was walking around thinking about bread so nobody would know who they had a crush on,” Andre had told him, when he’d come for the disastrous hunt. “It was hilarious. Everyone just stomping around with _pumpernickel_ and _baguette_ in fire above their heads.”

Nicke still thinks of it as some of his finest work, a sinuous snarl of magic primal and inhuman and designed to drag all the ugliness of Durmstrang into the air, light it up like a tree cored out by lightning. It felt great. He knew he'd get expelled as soon as the headmasters looked into the spell and found they couldn’t just cut through it. Nicke doesn’t set spells. He grows them, nurtures them, pulls them into being with will and care or a finger snagged into the threads of someone else’s to tug and tease it into a different shape. His magic is tenacious and strange, always a tangle.

He’s even done it to Sasha, coaxing his primed translation spell into one Nicky could hold onto. It’s strange to think of it now, knowing he did it without asking. It’s not nice, what he can do. It’s not the kind of magic good wizards use.

Nobody here seems to care.

Nicke runs into Professor Fedorov when he’s sneaking into the kitchens to get some bread to toast in the never-extinguished fires of the great hearths. He’s missed breakfast, but as ever here, nobody will punish him for it; the school is so small and so isolated nobody is ever missing, just briefly misplaced. Besides, where would any of them go? The ice sheet? Even the forest, green and verdant and constantly whispering to him is thin, a bad place to truly hide. It should feel like a trap, a terrarium, but it doesn’t. It feels safe.

“Ah, Bäckström,” Fedorov says, sitting on a stool in front of the largest fire with his big, long-boned hands wrapped around a huge mug of coffee. “Strange time of the year to oversleep. You should eat more than toast.”

“Professor,” Nicke offers, finding a pair of tongs hanging on the wall to toast his bread with. “I don’t have lessons this morning.”

“I know.” He gestures with one finger, waggling it without letting go of his cup. “It’s just coming up to summer. Most people don’t know what it’s like, when the daylight just stays and stays. It can make things strange for a while. Most students who feel it don’t sleep at all. Don’t often see the opposite problem.”

“It’s—” Nicke searches for the word. “I don’t know why. It’s like my body can’t decide what to be.”

Fedorov considers him over the rim of his mug for a moment. Nicke has no idea why he's confided in him. He’s never trusted teachers before, but he was so scared, coming out of the forest when he and Sasha brought it to life. He really thought something terrible would happen to them all and he was ready to face it, but instead they’ve just been taking it all in stride. Maybe it’s something about being locked together up here, a place nothing should live except for the distant sea creatures deep beneath the ice shelf. Maybe it’s because people really can be kind to each other sometimes.

That last one sounds fake, but Fedorov doesn’t seem to care much either way. He spends all his time gently coaxing plants to grow in a place that harbours nothing but the most tenacious of lichens, and nothing about Nicke’s ability to draw plants into proliferation has ever made him angry. He sips his coffee and watches Nicke burn his toast almost to a crisp before he speaks. “Well. Midsummer can make things strange.” He watches Nicke spread a thick layer of orange jam over his charred breakfast and smiles a little, a tiny hint of mirth lingering around his eyes. “It’s a time of flowering, even in the North.”

“I’m going home,” Nicke blurts, self-conscious, crumbs stuck in his teeth. “Sasha is coming with me.”

“Good,” Fedorov says, pushing himself to his feet. “He’s a terror over summer term, you’ll be doing me a favour.”

“As long as my mother doesn’t eat him,” Nicke mutters, swallowing a mouthful of toast too quickly.

Fedorov blinks at him. “What?”

“Not literally,” Nicke assures him, unsure how to explain it, the pull they have, the way she and his brother could drag a stag towards them with just a look, could charm a wanderer as easily as breathing. She wouldn’t ever _eat_ someone. It’s just— there’s seduction and then there’s compulsion, and Nicke sometimes has a hard time untangling the threads.

“Well, good,” Fedorov says, settling his robes back around his shoulders from the hook they’ve been hanging on to warm up on the stones. “I have some bets about his quidditch career I’d like to win. Yours too, if you go that way.”

Nicklas, dumbfounded, only has the presence of mind to finish his toast, unable to force a word out before Fedorov leaves the kitchen. Career? Sasha, yes. But him?

Nicke makes himself another piece of toast, chewing through it mechanically before he feels settled enough to go looking for Sasha again.

-

Sasha is on the field, of course. It’s almost noon by the time Nicke gets there but he’s still running drills with a few lingering students who haven’t gone home or won’t be leaving.

Nicke catches him elbowing Vrana, a new first-year, and directing him for a truly obscene play around Olesia and Kuznetsov, who’s staying for the summer term to harass Fedorov. He watches as Vrana jigs around their defensive line by coaxing his tree into a barrel roll and screams past them with a quaffle under one arm.

Kuzya yells, outraged, and gives chase, robes streaming out behind him, improperly tied as always. Olesia rolls her eyes and watches, waiting for them to come back around the pitch before she jolts sideways and slams Vrana off his tree to steal the ball back. She contemptuously tosses it through a ring while Kuzya catches Vrana by the collar and hauls him up behind him.

Sasha is sitting happily astride his sapling and watching with his arms crossed, bobbing gently in the air when Nicke rises up to join them. “Coaching already?” He asks, bumping their knees together.

It’s a beautiful day, sunlight filtering through the climate spell and leaving everything slightly golden, even the melting snow and the warm dark brown of Sasha’s windswept hair. Nicke wants to leap off his own tree and settle behind him, press himself against his warm, broad back and loop his arms around his wide, strong waist. He’s staring again.

“We’ll be really good next year,” Sasha says happily. “Olesia’s graduating, but I think we’ll find some more defenders. I hear we might even get some Swedish kids.”

“You’ll be graduating too,” Nicke reminds him.

“I might defer,” Sasha admits. “Play an extra year.”

This is news to Nicke. “Why? Any club who sees you will take you.”

Sasha shrugs, grin dimming to just a smile, small and intimate, just for him. “Marriage clause,” he says, reaching for Nicke’s hand and taking it in his, thick leather gloves supple against Nicke’s bare palms. “They’ll have to take us both.”

Nicke grips back too hard, seeing Sasha wince before he loosens his grip. “What?”

“Only if you want to!” Sasha amends, as though it’s just occurred to him Nicke might not want to play quidditch with him. “It’s just a thought.”

Bloody, blooming hell. Olga Bunina was right. “You don’t owe me that.”

Sasha looks at him strangely, a warm, crooked little smile settling into all the wonderful asymmetry of his face. “Of course not.” Then he ruins it by saying: “we’ll have to get married for real for anything like that.”

Nicke shoves him over, overwhelmed by the hunger that blooms in his chest, a wild, anarchic flowering of want. “That’s the worst proposal I’ve ever heard.”

Sasha grins at him and holds on to his tree with effortless ease, gripping tight with his knees as it rolls and yaws itself back to equilibrium. “At least I proposed,” Sasha points out. “Do you want to free the snitch and we’ll do four-against-one?”

Nicke can’t wait to be battered around suddenly, to be slammed by bodies from all angles, to burrow down into the focus of seeking. “Fuck yes,” he mutters. “Bring it on.” Sasha runs the tip of his tongue along the bottom of his top row of teeth, skipping the missing place where one of his incisors should be, looking at Nicke like he knows exactly what he’s thinking. There’s no reason Sasha should know him this well, not so soon, not so generously. “Shut up,” Nicke says, feeling his face heat.

“I didn’t say anything,” Sasha points out, smug to the end. “Go get the snitch.”

-

Eventually, Nicke does have to floo his parents.

He does it in the little fireplace in the prefects’ common room with Olesia’s permission, throwing a handful of power into the flames and waiting nervously for them to turn green. They do after a while, everything trying to reach the outside world taking just a little bit longer here.

He takes a deep breath, looks around the empty room once just to make sure he won’t be overheard, and sticks his head in the fire.

His father is sitting in his study with the windows open and his glasses on the very end of his nose, leafing through a sheaf of pressed herbs. “Oh, hello Nicke, we were wondering when we’d hear from you,” he says, looking over the little wire rims.

“You still haven’t seen a healer about your eyes?” Nicke asks, nonsensically.

“Ah, some things just happen with time. When are you coming home? Your mother misses you.”

Nicke doesn’t think that’s true; she might wonder where he is, but at Midsummer he knows she’ll have other things on her mind than one prodigal too-human child. “Has she gone yet?”

His mother wanders in, crossing the sunlit hardwood floor with her long hair loose, dense and green already. She’s heading towards bloom early this year, it seems, her eyes the colour of new buds and her skin already going the mottled white of birch bark. “Nicke,” she says, perhaps drawn by his voice. She goes to stand behind his father, dropping her small chin onto the top of his head and breathing deeply. She stares at him, unblinking, a look of deep contentment spread across her ageless face. “There you are.”

His father pushes his glasses further up his nose, undisturbed by the great curtain of hair he’s suddenly draped in. “Nicke was just scolding me,” he says.

His mother doesn’t say anything, eyes heavy-lidded and watchful.

“I’m coming home next week,” Nicke forces out, an ache settled in his chest, watching them. He knows they have never done anything to hurt him on purpose. They’re his parents. They’re his progenitors, human and not, both of them powerfully magical and powerfully selfish. “I’m bringing someone.”

“Oh?” His father takes his mother’s hand and holds it, thumb running over her knuckles, her skin making shadows like the knots of a tree. “Have you made a friend?”

Nicke has had friends before. Nicke has mentioned Andre and Marcus. It doesn’t seem worth it to do it again. It’s not the time of year when anything petty will stick. “I claimed someone,” he admits, forcing it out, feeling as though he’s betraying himself and Sasha all at once.

His father’s idle affection stills. Nicke isn’t really there, but he can feel the way his mother’s attention sharpens, comes into focus, her presence suddenly greater and wilder and more alert. “Interesting,” his father says, letting go of his mother’s hand, searching for a scrap of parchment to make a note on. “What did it feel like?”

Nicke swallows back his disappointment. “I don’t want to talk about it. He’s coming to meet you. We’re not— we haven’t— just. We’re taking a portkey, please leave the path open.”

“Of course,” his mother agrees, voice slow and rich as sap. “I’ll tell Kristoffer.”

“Thank you,” Nicke says, trying not to be curt. His father nods too, scribbling something down too busily to notice when Nicke pulls his head out of the fire.

-

Nicke doesn’t pack anything. He’ll be back here soon enough, and everything he needs he can find at home.

Sasha dithers for a whole day over his trunk, flooing his mother to have one of their yell-talks, lively and open and affectionately confrontational, voices filling the common room as she yells at him to “pack at least one formal robe, you never know how foreigners celebrate!”

“Yes, mama!” Sasha yells back obediently, his whole chest in the fireplace as though he could crawl through it if he wanted.

Nicke admires the backs of his thighs while he listens, touched that Sasha doesn’t mind him eavesdropping. It’s strange to hear them bicker; the first time Nicke thought they were having an argument, every fine hair on the back of his arms standing up in alarm, until he’d realised that the tension between them was love. Sasha had pulled his head out of the fire grinning and settled, delighted to have been scolded. Nicke doesn’t understand it even a little bit, but he loves to listen. He wonders what she looks like, what else Sasha has gotten from her aside from his magic.

“You’re not packing?” Sasha asks him, where he notices Nicke isn’t occupied.

“I have things at home,” he says. “Don’t pack anything you don’t want to ruin,” he cautions.

Sasha shrugs. “Things can be repaired.”

Nicke loves him so much it feels perilous, like a summer storm, a great crash of thunder against the inside of his ribs. “If you say so,” he shrugs, lost for how to put it into words. “Are you ready yet?”

-

The portkey deposits them in a clearing Nicke recognizes. It’s new, in a slightly different place, but the trees whisper to him in the same way, path revealing itself when he looks for it.

“Oh, they’re moving,” Sasha says, staring around with wonder bare on his face. “Are you doing that?”

“No, they’re friends of my mother’s,” Nicke explains. “Cousins, I guess.”

“Tell them thank you,” Sasha says, looping one heavy arm over Nicke’s shoulders. “Tell them they’re very pretty.”

“They heard you.”

The trees are rustling happily, a faint breeze setting off a cascade of gentle sounds. Sasha looks up, sunlight dappling his face, catching at the pale grey flecks in his wide-set blue eyes. Nicke wants to sink into him, to let him take his weight and just stand there for a second, warm and quiet, so of course they’re immediately interrupted.

“Oh, you’re here,” Kristoffer says neutrally from the path. “I thought it might be hunters again.”

“You knew damn well it was me,” Nicke points out, trying not to be sharp.

Kris blinks his big, murky eyes at him. He hasn’t started going green yet, but he’s almost ready. Nicke can tell from the slowness of his movements, the smooth creak of his voice like a heavy branch moving. “Well, you’ve always been more human, and now you’ve brought one back, too.”

“Papa is a human.”

“Papa never leaves,” Kris says, looking at Sasha. “Really Nicke? This one?”

“Is he talking to me?” Sasha asks him, Russian a shock all of a sudden.

“Say hello, Kris,” Nicke says in Norse, knowing Sasha understands it better than Swedish.

“Hello,” Kris says, crossing his arms over his bare chest. “Are you coming in?”

“Hi,” Sasha says back. “I hope so. I’m starving.”

Nicke slips an arm around his waist while Kris watches, unwilling to be parted from him for an instant.

Maybe it’s just because Kris is teasing him already, but another part of Nicke is unfurling, back in the forest of his birth, his feet infuriatingly separated from the loam by his boots, skin enclosed by fabric, and Nicke can feel himself growing a little wilder again. He wants Sasha’s skin against his. He wants him to chase him through the forest and never leave again. It’s frightening. It’s normal. It’s already happened once and Sasha is still here, hand spread over the curve of Nicke’s shoulder. It’s so hard to remember sometimes that Nicke has been forgiven for that, and harder still right now to remember it was unfair.

“Papa has food,” Kris says, with supreme disinterest, “if that’s what you’re into.”

“As if you don’t eat for eleven months of the year,” Nicke mutters.

Kris pretends not to hear him and heads off towards wherever the house is this year. If Nicke concentrates he can see it, trace the threads of magic along their strings, coiling into the thick ropes which make up the root system of his family, leading him home.

-

Nicke hasn’t ever been able to explain himself to them. It’s not for lack of effort; as a child he used to try to tell his father what he was seeing, how he was feeling, and his father would nod earnestly and write it down, offering him a quick pat in exchange, a soft entreaty to tell him more. It never felt like anything more than curiosity, the kind of thing one might reserve for a strange animal, or a hybrid child that displayed no clear division of his heritable traits.

Nicke has always been the son of scholar and a skogsrå, and has had to accept that neither of them can tell him what he is, Nicke, caught in the middle.

His mother embraces him when they walk into the house, folding him into her long, warm arms, wrapping him in the green, new scent of her. It’s the embrace of something blooming and indescribable, her wild magic spreading away from her in coils as tangled and natural as her hair.

She says nothing, holding his face between her long hands, her fingers soft as sun-supple leaves.

He blinks slowly at her, comforted by the touch, deep in the grip of her regard. She presses their foreheads together, and Nicke feels briefly at home for as long as they are breathing together, a great pulse of contentment that comes from nowhere and everywhere, the forest welcoming back one of its own.

And then she lets go, pressing her lips to his forehead once before she’s gone, stepping out the door and taking her welcome with her, out into the woods.

“Wow,” Sasha breathes behind him. Nicke had completely forgotten he was there. “Can you do that?”

Nicke is shaking, trying to calm down the howling part of himself that always rises to meet her, the hot, slow, molten core. “Do what?”

“Everything went—” Sasha waves a hand in the air, looking awed, standing against the kitchen wall as the room comes slowly back into focus for Nicke, who has almost forgotten the house and everything in it. “Slow, for a second.”

“Not on purpose,” Nicke says, trying to catch his breath, to force back the urge he has to try it, to go up to Sasha and call him his own and make him part of it, the overwhelming bloom of life and magic that is Midsummer calling him, just around the corner.

Sasha looks at him again, frowning. “Nicky. Are you okay?”

“Let’s find my father,” Nicke says breathlessly. “Then we can go to my room.”

Sasha’s frown doesn’t go away, but he’s so much kinder than Nicke is. He lets him be, following him towards where the study was last time.

They find his father where he usually is, working on something incomprehensible with scales and measures, the sharp scent of something burning rising from his desk. He looks up at them as they enter, holding up a finger on the hand holding his wand steady, asking them to wait.

“What’s he doing?” Sasha asks, pressed against Nicke’s back in the doorway, watching the flame burn heatlessly over the desk.

“I have no idea,” Nicke admits. “Probably just putting on a show.”

“It’s unkind to whisper, Nicke,” his father says, extinguishing his desk with a flick of his wand. “Introduce me to our guest!”

“This is Sasha,” Nicke says, sticking to Norse, unsure how else to explain him. This is the boy I’ve laid a claim on. This is the person I love so much I don’t know what to do with it, this is the hot coal in my hands I never want to put down. “He’s from Moscow.”

“Moscow!” Nicke’s father exclaims. “Wonderful place. I particularly liked those great underground tunnels, what are they called?”

“The metro,” Sasha supplies, still warm against Nicke’s back.

“Yes! Yes the metro. Excellent things. Very loud.”

A silence descends in which none of them have anything else to say to each other. Nicke sighs. “Papa, will Mama let me grow something?”

“Well, you know she can’t stop you, Nicke. It just might not stick, you know what she’s like at this time of year.”

Still. It’s worth a try, for the sake of communication if nothing else. “I’m going to do the translation spell again,” he warns Sasha in Russian. “It might hurt a little.”

“Worth it,” Sasha shrugs. “My Norse is terrible.”

Nicke closes his eyes and reaches out, searching for the best vein to tap to draw from, weaving the thread he plucks out from under the hearth with his own magic, the part of him that is searching for understanding. This one he’s done before; he pulls in a little wisp of Sasha too, hoping it won’t be too painful. He spins it all together into a new cord and lets it settle back into the weft of the house’s magic, a crack of soundless displacement letting him know it’s working, for now.

Sasha retches. His father’s eyes are watering. Nicke feels fine. “How’s that?” He asks in Swedish.

“Much better, thank you,” his father says. “Norse is so formal. Reminds me of exams. Now, I know you won’t be hungry Nicke, but let’s get Sasha something to eat. Portkeys always made me hungry.”

Nicke doesn’t ask him when the last time he travelled was. It was long before Nicke was born, he thinks. Maybe even before Kristoffer. Still, it’s nice of him to try.

“We’ll take something to my room,” he says, trying to be kind. “We should rest. It was a long term.”

“Oh, good,” his father says, returning immediately to his wand, lifting it in preparation for whatever he was doing. “Help yourself to anything!” He says to their backs.

“Why won’t you be hungry?” Sasha asks him, when Nicke does lead him back to the kitchen. “Wait, is this where it was a second ago?”

“Oh, it moves,” Nicke says distractedly. “I think my spell pulled it closer to the centre.”

“You’ll have to tell me how you do that,” Sasha breathes, looking around the bright, sunlit room before he opens the icebox. “Why won’t you be hungry? You’re always hungry.”

“The sun,” Nicke responds, looking at the back of his hand. Still pink, still human. “I don’t know why, exactly. I just don’t need that kind of food.”

Sasha looks at him, chewing slowly on a piece of cold sausage, before he offers the other end to Nicke anyway. “Can you still eat?”

Nicke opens his mouth to let Sasha feed him a bite. It tastes distant, unnecessary, but it’s for Sasha, not for him.

“Good,” Sasha says, visibly relieved. “It’s not good not to eat. My mother would be very upset I was such a bad husband, not making sure you’re fed.”

“Oh, she would?” Nicke asks, playing along. “What else makes a good husband?”

Sasha grins at him, tucking the rest of the sausage into a cloth before hiding it somewhere in his robes. “Did you say something about showing me your bedroom?”

-

Nicke’s bedroom is always in the attic. Sometimes the ceiling is very high, timber-framed and light-filled. Others, it’s small and dark and cosy, little round skylights instead of big, alcoved windows; the bed is always against the wall furthest from the narrow ladder, and the quilt is always blue and yellow.

This time the beams are low, but the windows are in long rows of little squares, half already standing open, and there's a narrow door to the roof standing just slightly ajar.

The bed isn’t wide enough for two and the beams are too low for Sasha not to have to duck to avoid hitting his head, just like Nicke. “This is where you grew up? Little Nicky, under the roof?”

“Sometimes the ceiling is higher,” Nicke says, drawing him towards the door. They perch on the gently sloping roof, tiles dry and hot beneath them. From up here Nicke can see all the great roots, all the clusters of growth he knows so well, all the ancient trees wandering the forest at their glacial pace. It’s home. Sometimes Nicke wishes he loved it less.

“It’s beautiful,” Sasha says. “Thank you for bringing me.”

Nicke takes his hand and kisses the bruised knuckles, the broad back, skin soft and warm and human. “I claimed you,” Nicke admits, quietly. “Like my mother claimed my father. It’s not— not like it used to be. Not like it was for them, I think. You don’t have to stay where I am.”

Sasha takes his hand back, but only to tilt Nicke’s face towards him, the gentle breeze stirring the treetops the only breath Nicke can feel for a moment as Sasha strokes up under his chin, eyes searching for something in Nicke’s expression. “Tell me more?”

Sasha has always been braver than him. Nicke swallows. “He’s hers. She claimed him. I used to think he didn't want to leave. Now I think maybe he can’t. The humans— they told me at Durmstrang that people who love us are never seen again once they go into the forest. I always thought it wasn’t true, but maybe it is. If I do something tomorrow, and you don’t want it—”

“Nicky,” Sasha starts, but Nicke quiets him, a finger to his lips.

“Anything, even if it’s— I don’t know. Don’t let me. Say no.”

Sasha is so close, so big and warm and kind. Nicke wonders what made him this way, if it’s just nature or if it’s something Sasha does, bends himself fully into the best of himself and lets it be the biggest part. Sasha takes Nicke gently by the wrist and turns it up to the setting sun. The veins on the underside have gone green with it, ready for dawn already. “Nicky.” Sasha says his name like a spell, as though the sound has to be just right. “I already said yes. At the feast.”

“You didn't know,” Nicke says, feeling helpless. He wanted Sasha to come. He wants him here. He wants him to know what he is. He’s so afraid of having been so selfish. “And it wasn’t my forest.”

Sasha considers him, the green beneath his skin and the whole expanse of trees around them, the small universe that Nicke was so desperate to leave he demanded to be sent to school, no matter how much it hurt.

“You’re human too,” Sasha says finally, leaning in just a little bit closer. “Too mean to be all tree. Too bossy.”

Nicke laughs despite himself, curling in towards him, burying his hands in the thicket of his hair. He kisses him gently, pushing aside the part welling up beneath his skin that demands the rest, the breath in his lungs and the love in his heart and the warm magic in all of it. “Say no tomorrow,” he says, breaking for breath when Sasha’s chest begins to hitch. “Just in case.”

“Say yes when I propose again,” Sasha says in return. “We’ll be like those books Olesia pretends she doesn’t read. School romance.”

“I said yes already,” Nicke reminds him. “So we’re even. Let’s go inside.”

In their absence the bed has doubled in size, twice as wide and twice as long, with twice as many pillows. Sasha stares at it, smiling. “Did you do that?”

Nicke shakes his head. “The house likes you too, I guess.”

Sasha glances at him, as though looking directly at Nicke will scare him away. “Likes me too?”

Nicke buries his face in Sasha’s shoulder and breathes in, quieting the part of him chanting mine-mine-mine like the beat of a heart. “Come on, before it changes its mind,” Nicke says instead, finally shrugging out of his robes.

It’s very strange to do this in his childhood bed, no matter what size it is. Sasha is everywhere, the heat and breadth of him sticking out against the piled-up years of memories. He lets Nicke kiss him, and then when it becomes too overwhelming, when Nicke starts to shake and the beams in the ceiling begin to creak, Sasha just looks at him and strokes his hair and smiles, and Nicke wonders why it’s that of all things which undoes him.

-

In the morning Nicke’s skin is the gold of freshly-split pine, his hair the colour of a fir’s needles, a deep blue-dusted green. He can feel the sun again like a great embrace, the longest day calling him to the forest.

Sasha follows him to the trees, grip on his hand so tight Nicke can’t tell which of them is crushing the other.

Nicke is so happy he’s here that he’s awash with it, gratitude so deep it keeps surprising him all over again.

Sasha could have rejected this a hundred times at a hundred increments: when Nicke first channeled his fear of his new school into suspicion of Sasha’s motives. When Nicke raced past him during the hunt he was meant to be leading, drunk on the wild vitality of it, the possibility of life pulsing under the white forest, all its dormant roots waiting for a spark. When Nicke had tried so hard to untangle them afterwards, his claim on Sasha based on nothing but reckless nature and Sasha’s easygoing gentleness. Never once has Sasha been anything other than good to him, kind and curious and better than Nicke deserves.

Nicke has been naked around him so often that it no longer feels strange, but this is a different kind nakedness, a stripping of who he is outside of this place and outside of this time.

His mother is standing in the sun between two towering pines, watching them silently. Kristoffer is somewhere nearby. Nicke can feel him, knowing he prefers the shade and the softness of deep moss. “He’s coming too,” Nicke tells her, even though she's not going to answer.

“Where’s your father?” Sasha asks him, looking around them, at the house, the trees, at Nicke’s mother who is watching them benevolently, always part of the forest the way a door is a part of a house.

“He’s still sleeping,” Nicke explains. “I think it’s boring for him now.”

“What is?”

“We’re going visiting,” Nicke says, trying to remember his words. The spell he’s woven into the house is holding, but it’s Nicke that’s failing this time; speaking seems difficult when he’s trying to explain what is essentially wordless.

“Visiting who?”

“The loci,” Nicke says. “You’ll see.”

Sasha nods, and then Nicke’s mother is gone, vanished into the forest without even a footprint to mark her passage. “Wow,” Sasha breathes. “Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Nicke says. “Ready?”

Sasha's grip doesn’t loosen. “Show me.”

Nicke has only done this for himself before. He takes a deep breath and reaches into the roots, searching for the right one before he lets got of the part of him that has been speaking, that has been anything other than his mother’s son, and steps into the trees.

-

His locus is a towering ancient oak, hollow on the inside.

It’s where he was born. It might be where his mother was born too, though he doesn’t know if born is quite the right word for it. Maybe it’s his grandfather, he thinks, wordlessly, erupting from beneath it, through the roots into the hollow space within.

Sasha gasps and loses his balance, bracing himself against the living bark that is all that remains of the tree’s great insides, the thinning shell of its pulp and veins. Its leaves are still bright, but fewer bud every year. Nicke won‘t grieve it. He’ll miss it, though. He helps Sasha up.

It’s like slipping into a warm bath, a deep eddy in a stream, a stillness produced only by something ancient and patient and settled. Nicke wishes it didn’t, sometimes. He wishes it was less imperative, that he was less bound to this part of his nature. He wishes he could say no to it if he wanted, that it wouldn’t be such a relief to be here in the cradle of his forest with the human part of him very far away.

Sasha stands in the middle of the hollow space and looks up at the branches. “What is this?” He asks quietly. He looks dazed, drunk, and suddenly Nicke remembers the taste of his vodka, that frosted, apple-scented snap of welcome he had felt when Sasha first shared it with him. Nicke has never been drunk, but maybe that’s what this is, the sun going through him, the perfect equilibrium of his natural magic, the devastating want surging up with nothing to stop it, amplified by the ancient centre of his home.

He takes Sasha by the face, willing him to see it, the greenness, the slow growth, unable to say it. Sasha is outside of it, when Nicke closes his eyes to look. He’s so human, so big and warm. He’s always carried his magic around like embers, red and orange, colours that spark through him every time Nicke looks at him from the right angle, with the right eyes. Nicke wants to weave him in, to twist him into the roots and keep him forever.

He reaches, pressing their foreheads together, searching for threads. Sasha must feel it; he must know what Nicke is asking, what he’s tangling his magic into. He gasps, time slowing by increments. Welcome him, Nicke thinks. Make him part of home. “Stay,” Nicke says, or tries to.

Sasha looks at him, eyes very close, wide-spaced and arresting. “Nicky,” he whispers, barely a sound, “no.”

Nicke is furious with relief, filled with an ache so deep he thinks it might live in him forever, a great stabbing pain of contradiction. He wants to keep him so badly it hurts. He's so glad he can’t.

Sasha sighs, breath cool between them, and Nicke wonders how hot he is, how brightly he's burning, for it to feel like that. “Can I kiss you?”

“It might hurt,” Nicke says, feeling his voice come out like a breaking branch, the snap and splinter of green twigs.

“I like it when it hurts,” Sasha tells him, pressing a small, chaste kiss to his lips.

Nicke does too, in a way; there’s something perfect about it, the disharmony, the resistance he feels, the howling ancient thing in his blood having to bow to the human, too.

Sasha refuses and kisses him anyway.

Neither and both, Nicke thinks, kissing him back. He’s at the height of his power, the longest day of the year, when he could do anything he wanted to this fragile human in his grip, and can still choose not to.

He can still come home and be Nicke, too.

-

The renewal always feels like he’s shedding skin, as though the year before is peeling off him in strips.

He soaks up the very last of the sun with Sasha in his arms, and then, as it starts to go down, he watches with relief as his skin begins to lose its glow, as the rush begins to ebb, leaving him smouldering with the leftover heat instead of burning from the inside.

He doesn’t know how Sasha can stand it, but even the violent heat Nicke is giving off doesn’t seem to bother him much. He just traces a finger over the very edge of one of Nicke’s nipples, following a fading hint of a knot down his belly, finally laying a palm flat over the middle of him where his navel is, a little human dip in the restored softness of his skin.

Nicke covers his hand with his own, still not trusting himself to speak, and reaches for the roots again, taking them back to the edge of the forest.

-

Nicke wakes up the next morning in his bed, still twice the size it should be.

Sasha is awake already, watching him, a look on his face Nicke has never seen before, a sleepy contentment emanating from him. Nicke is used to him leaping out of bed, heading to the pitch, heading to breakfast, always going somewhere. Slow moments are for nights, for the moments after Sasha has shown him some new thing he's learned about his body, after he’s asked Nicke for something and gotten his wish. “Hi,” Nicke says, voice almost back to normal. He’s not sure if he can touch, in the light of a new morning.

“Hi,” Sasha says back at him, leaning over to kiss him again. “Your dad is offering me breakfast. He can really yell, now I see where you get your lungs from.”

Nicke thwacks him with a pillow. He still isn’t hungry, sated on sunlight and home. “So why are you still here?”

“I thought about it,” Sasha admits, laughing, before he continues, and Nicke realizes he’s talking about something else. “What you said. About him never leaving.”

“Oh.”

“Does she leave? Your mother?”

Nicke considers it, the idea so strange. He doesn’t know how they met, what they did, how they found each other. It’s not the kind of thing they talk about. He just knows Kristoffer complained the whole time while he was taking Nicke to the portkey to send him to school, and that everything they needed they had sent to the closest small town, clinging to the edge of the forest. Nicke remembers his father reading him stories about the world, and never taking him into it, but it’s never occurred to him that his mother might have, once. “Why would she? This is her forest.”

“It’s yours too.” Sasha presses his thumb to Nicke’s lower lip, briefly forestalling his reply. “You can still go anywhere you want.”

Nicke feels strange, tilted, Sasha’s touch warm and welcome, and then the kiss, morning-sour and perfect anyway, but Nicke still doesn’t know what to say. He brushes the hair out of Sasha’s eyes, rolling them over so Sasha is the one on his back, Nicke’s head pillowed on his chest. “I always come back for midsummer.”

Sasha takes Nicke’s unspoken hint and starts pulling the tangles out of his hair again, a small act of care nobody has done for him since he was very, very small. He hums tunelessly, chest vibrating beneath Nicke’s cheek. “What were you going to do? If I hadn’t said no?”

Nicke has no idea how to explain it, now that he’s almost human again, now that there’s only the faintest hint of green beneath his skin and he has a heartbeat again that isn’t pounding in rhythm to something deeper and slower than human time. “I’ve never needed a wand,” Nicke says, glad he can’t see his face for a second, wanting the space to think before he speaks. “You’ve felt it. My magic hurts you, sometimes. It takes from you, like a— a thread. I can see them. I can pull them. I don’t need a wand to direct it, just… attention.”

“You can take other people’s magic too?” Sasha’s hand stills. “Do you keep it?”

“Yes, but not— not like that. I can move it around. I can make things grow.” He takes a deep breath, surrounded by the scent of him, sweat and the faint hint of wool from his robes and the echo of his arousal, half-hard beneath the covers. If he closes his eyes, he’ll see the rest of him, too. “I can tie things down. Weave things in.”

“So it would have been my forest too,” Sasha says, fingers snagged in a stubborn curl, just painful enough to be good as he slowly, patiently works it free. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“That’s not what I want,” Nicke says, or tries to say, words —even between them, in this small space where Nicke has felt so safe— inadequate for what is at its core a feeling, an instinct. “I want you to be— no.” He stops, biting his tongue, pressing it between his teeth. “No. It was for me.” He lets out a long breath, feeling it deep in his lungs. “I don’t want you to have to stay with me.” Sasha is too big for this, too vital, too much a creature of the world. “I want to go where you go.”

Sasha cradles the back of his skull, as though the bone there is fragile. Nicke is human too, but he isn’t breakable, not like some. “What about school?”

Nicke thinks of it, the great, pale expanse of trees, almost crystalline, perpetually icy even now that it’s growing again. They all share one root, every one of them, one great system beneath them, woven into the spells around the school. Nicke and Sasha woke it up, with the favour of something more alien than even Nicke can claim to be. “It already belonged to something else,” Nicke explains. “We just made the right sacrifice, I think.”

“I like that,” Sasha decides, as though it can be that easy. “So you’ll marry me the normal way, then? We can have a party and invite our friends and everyone will get us something expensive?”

Nicke laughs at him, into his skin. “You’d really do that?”

Sasha takes him gently by the hair, tugging so Nicke has to look at him or tell him to stop. Nicke looks at him. “I would,” Sasha says. “Will you human marry me?”

Nicke imagines it; a party, people, vows, and none of it any more magical than just two people making a pledge. “Yes,” he decides, full enough to spill over, replete with the feeling only Sasha draws out of him, the fragile joy that Nicke has no word for. “I will human marry you.”

“Good,” Sasha says. “ _Now_ I’m ready for breakfast.”

Nicke watches him roll out of bed, waiting a moment before he follows to watch him walk away, happy to have nothing but a promise between them, for as long as it lasts.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Did I write this in three days? Sure did. Are there things I may have forgotten to tag? You betcha. Can you tell me about them? Please do. 
> 
> Thanks again to all the cheerleaders, and all mistakes are always mine.


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